


Won't Hold Water Now

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 07:36:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You are something of an APOCALYPSE BUFF, which something you can be on Alternia.</i> </p><p>Vriska has too much time on her hands in her dream bubble. Aradia intrudes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Won't Hold Water Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FaustianAspirant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaustianAspirant/gifts).



> This was a fantastic excuse to finally sit my behind down and write 1) Vriska tinkering with machines, and 2) Aradia and Vriska loathing each other! (I think they're too young here and in canon to be Right Proper kismeses, and have too much of the wrong kind of baggage to ever be healthy--but that's _fascinating._ ) (Also, unexpected Vriska-and-Equius bromance feelings, how did that happen.)
> 
> And thanks to [Pell](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Pell/pseuds/Pell) and [Gatty](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Gatty/pseuds/Gatty) for being my gracious betas.

The first thing Vriska decides is that the dream bubbles suck, massively, and for all the awesome parts of her and Terezi's old FLARP campaigns she has to re-live, there's every still-living body she fed to her lusus as a special treat. Or Eridan's clammy hands on her bare shoulders when they played kismesis. Or having the wiring in her false arm connected to her nerve endings for the first time. Or being smashed into a cliffside by an angry dead psionic in a robot.

But she's a god. She's beaten one system already, she can beat another one. So she clears it all out: the memories are probably around, somewhere, but they're not bothering her.

The minute she's got some empty space, she starts imagining whole planets into being. From the surface of a pink moon, she wonders if John would like to see this -- if he wanders through again, if he'll sit up here with her and watch her make worlds come together out of dust and fire.

In the dream bubble, her doomsday devices always work.

*

Nanotechnology is easy when you get to make up the laws of physics, and Vriska blows up the prototype to whatever size she needs it be -- which would be awesome, except Vriska's never been good with the fiddly details.

Equius is the next person to show up in her dream bubble, which renders the problem moot.

Maybe she's dreaming him up, conjuring him out of the memories of all the times he's bailed her out of some mechanical problem before, but she couldn't make up the ring of blue-black bruises around his throat. Vriska knows better than to ever, ever, _ever_ ask about how Equius got hurt.

"This isn't Alternia," Equius says. He touches his neck, just once, and then the marks disappear.

The planet she's made up is almost all rainforest, like she saw once traveling to meet Terezi, and instead of oceans she's given it rivers and lakes and tiny seas, like a big circulatory system. It doesn't have to make sense. Half of it only really exists when she remembers it. "I've got nothing else to do, and the memories were _boring_."

"Heaven forbid. Who killed you?"

"Who do you think?"

"I think Terezi must have had a very good reason," says Equius, "but acted above her station. It's a disgrace." He sounds like he doesn't believe a single word coming out of his mouth. That's a new one.

"You got me killed me, too," Vriska says, for lack of anything else to do.

"Not directly." Equius steps on one of the tiny, venomous spiders that crawls out of the foliage. No matter how hard she tries, she can't imagine them away, or even make them look any less like tiny versions of her lusus. He should be sweating through his clothes, but she guesses that in their dreams, he can control his bodily functions. "Killed by two lowbloods, Serket."

"Terezi's only one shade down from me, asshole." Vriska holds her hand out for a pair of pliers, and knows he'll know what to hand her. "Gamzee's only one shade up from _you_."

Lucky guess; the bruises reappear on his neck for a second before he remembers to make them gone. She expects him to say something like _it was an honor_ , or _it was the best I could ever hope for_ , but all Equius does is press his thin lips together into an even thinner line.

Then, with that look he only gets on his face when he's working on the finest, prettiest killer robots, he reaches over her head into the nanomachine. And -- what the heck, she gets out of his way to let him do some re-wiring. Even dead, even when it's not really real, he's delicate with this stuff; she wouldn't have gone to anyone else for her arm. "It's inelegant," he says.

"Yeah, well, it's supposed to kill seadwellers," she says, "but I'm a dabbler, I should stick to the bombs, is that it?"

"Consistently sloppy execution. You would have been culled for this work, in the imperial service." Equius reaches for a towel and dabs at his face. If she hadn't lived next door to him her whole life, she'd be thrown by the way he emphasizes the x in real life, too. "I'm ashamed to know you, Vriska Serket."

She punches his shoulder with the fist he built for her, thinks she might have caught the friendship disease for him someday if he were less of a freak, and then he dissolves like a puff of smoke and leaves her all alone.

The nanomachines are designed to suck the water out of everything, and be self-replicating, and she thinks really hard about making the entire planet exist and drops the bomb. Hovering in space and watching them spread through the world like a cancer with teeth is less satisfying than she'd thought it would be. And that's fine. She can try again.

*

The second world is all water. Four little moons -- which is, okay, excessive, but Vriska needs the light to work by -- provide the tides and currents. She doesn't even bother making the boat realistic. This world, she's going to refine the watersucking nanobots, and she going to do it _honestly_ this time.

Her resolve lasts about ten seconds.

It's a week, by Vriska's reckoning -- time is funny -- before she has a better, working prototype, and she's just about to shrink it down to size when she feels something push through the skin of the dream bubble. It makes her go cold all over, from the tips of her fingers to the top of her skull.

Aradia Megido hovers over her boat. The red gear on her chest is the exact same shape as the one in Vriska's hand. _Nice,_ Vriska thinks, before she can help herself. But everything looks more real around Aradia, sharper and brighter, like her _aliveness_ is infecting the dreamspace with some awful plague of clarity.

"Equius passed through a little while ago," Vriska says, "y'know, in case you took a wrong turn looking for loverboy. He's one bubble to the left, for what it's worth."

There's that ancient, instinctive lowblood fear of water in Aradia's eyes, but, hey, they're both gods here, and it's gone by the time she touches down on the deck.

"I was expecting a frilly apron for the Maid of Time," Vriska goes on, wiping a smear of day-old grease off her forearm. All it does is spread it further down her arm. "You're still lamer than me! But not _that_ lame."

"This was not the intended use for the dream bubbles," says Aradia. This is the first time in sweeps that she's looked Vriska straight in the eye, and it's freaky, hearing her without that mostly-dead echo in her voice.

"Yeah, well, I cheat." Setting down the wrench, Vriska pulls up a stool, puts her feet up on the rim of the machine. "Vriska Serket, the greatest cheating cheater that ever lived! Isn't that right?"

Aradia looks bored, _really_ bored, like Vriska is the least entertaining person in at least two universes, and that's miles better than empty robot eyes and a mechanical voice telling her to go away. She raises her hand, and the stool tips of its own volition and dumps Vriska onto the deck. "That's right," she says.

"Come on," says Vriska, "you killed me once. That enough?"

"If I'd meant to kill you, I would have done it all the way." Behind Aradia, the world cracks up into a memory from her mind: in the grainy, red-tinged vision of the soulbot, a metal fist meeting Vriska's jaw with a crack. "You were always meant to reach god tier. I helped."

"You enjoyed every second."

"I wasn't wired to enjoy anything."

"You _liked_ it, Megido." And Vriska could hate her for it. Vriska could hate her a lot. Lowbloods just aren't vicious enough to be proper kismeses, everyone knows that, but as she watches herself get beaten at least seven-eighths of the way to death, the affectionate detail in the memories makes her wonder. Every drop of cerulean blood, every one of Vriska's screams and pleas for mercy -- she'd forgotten that she'd begged, everyone always begs at the end, and how nice of Aradia to remind her -- rendered hyperclear.

This is _her_ dream bubble. She's only partway a psionic, but she can still assert control enough to shut Aradia down. The mental tug-of-war only lasts a few seconds, and when it's over Vriska's finds herself in the yellow-and-orange of a Hero of Light, pirate sword nowhere to be seen. "Did you come here for round two, is that it? Round three, even?" she asks, imagining her dice into her hand. "Wanna bet that I still can't mind-control you in here? Wanna bet that I can't make you turn yourself inside-out?"

This might as well be FLARP, and Aradia's always been able to call Vriska's bluffs.

"You can't," Aradia says. The Light tells Vriska -- Aradia's going to turn the boat over, and Vriska isn't faster than a hero of Time and only manages to get herself and her machine off of the deck before they're submerged. "I'm visiting all of the dream bubbles. You'll be happy to know that Tavros is comfortable! And he forgives you. A little bit."

"You don't."

"Oh," Aradia says, " _never_."

It's breathy and quiet and venomous, and it makes Vriska's bloodpusher skip a whole beat and a half. The points of the dice bite into her clenched fist, and all she wants is to cast them and see how bad they hurt Aradia, see that dirty maroon blood on the surface of the moonlit waters. "We're even," Vriska says, and can't stem the tide of words -- "I killed you, and then you -- "

"You used my best friend to kill me." Aradia blinks out of existence for an agonizingly long moment, then reappears right in front of Vriska and takes a fistful of hood and twists it in her grasp. The edges of Vriska's wings crinkle in on themselves under the force of Aradia's rage. Vriska _remembers_ this feeling. It makes her blood turn to icewater and her bones to jelly, and she lets Aradia suspend her over the waters. Any second now, Aradia will tear her to shreds, then drop her, and because Vriska thinks it's real -- can't control right now whether she thinks it's real -- it'll be real, and she made Eridan teach her to swim sweeps and sweeps ago but Aradia can hold her under.

"You used Sollux to kill me, and you didn't think twice about it."

The water in the ocean under them boils dry in an instant. All Vriska can think to say is, "You're pathetic, Megido."

Aradia drops her.

The fall stops just a hair short of the seabed. Vriska draws a shaking breath in, and finds her throat raw from screaming. Aradia touches down next to her prone body with a self-satisfied grin. She's not that strong a psionic, Vriska has to remind herself. She's no Sollux Captor. And -- she doesn't even look angry anymore.

With more effort than she'd like, she struggles to her feet. She's taller than Aradia by a good half a head. Aradia doesn't struggle when Vriska grabs her shoulders. "If I'm pathetic," Aradia says, "then what does that make you?"

"I liked you better when you were dead."

"You're a liar." Aradia puts her hands on Vriska's waist, tearing holes into the fabric there. Vriska clutches at Aradia's shoulders and feels the skin part like tissue paper under her grip.

She'd forgotten how fever-warm rustbloods were, how nearly mammalian, and it pisses her off that the color of Aradia's outfit is going to hide the bloodstains until they dry -- that they won't even be real bloodstains. None of this is real. "You're a liar," Aradia repeats, flinching when Vriska digs hard into the muscle. "And a cheat, and I'm glad I gave Tavros the chance to kill you."

"Oh, fuck you," Vriska says, she leans in, or else Aradia stands on her toes, and they meet clumsily somewhere in the middle, snarling. Aradia's claws scrape up Vriska's ribs, gouging her to the bone on both sides, and Vriska shouts into her mouth from the twin bursts of pain. She doesn't shove her away. She shoves the hurt to the back of her mind and takes her time with the kiss. She'll lull Aradia into a false sense of security, and then she'll throw her to the ground and show her who's the highblood, here, who's the _real_ predator.

Their horns touch, just a little, and Aradia shoves her away. Vriska clutches at her side, her own blood slick and cool under her palms. Aradia's hands are clean. _It's not real,_ Vriska thinks, and straightens up, the wounds healed in an instant. "Well, now you've checked in," Vriska says. "Everything's in order, come visit again sometime! It was fun, Megido, it really was. I'm -- "

"Rambling."

"So?" The seabed is depressing, and Vriska can't even remember why she'd thought making up this planet was a good idea in the first place, anyway. She shifts the scene to the grasses outside her and Equius's hives. Aradia blinks and coughs in blank surprise -- something to file away for next time, if there even is one. "Maybe next time you'll actually hurt me, won't that be something!"

Aradia nods her head, and Vriska's mechanical arm falls to pieces; Vriska reassembles it in seconds. Those few panicked seconds before she remembers that she can turn her stomach into knots. "You're dead, remember?" Aradia says, kicking off the ground. "There wouldn't be any point."


End file.
